90 posts categorized "Books"

Dec 18, 2016

Before 2016 concludes I want to acknowledge the 10th anniversary of Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, which grew out of their classic HBR article of the same title. Subtitled What it Takes to be an Authentic Leader (and published with a new preface in 2015), this book had a substantial impact on my approach to coaching when I encountered it just as I was launching my practice, and I continue to find it a valuable resource today.

At the core of Goffee and Jones' work are a set of principles distilled from their work as coaches and consultants to senior leaders in a range of fields:

Everyone agrees that leaders need vision, energy, authority, and strategic direction. That goes without saying. But we've discovered that inspirational leaders also share four unexpected qualities:

They selectively show their weaknesses. By exposing some vulnerability, they reveal their approachability and humanity.

They rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of their actions. Their ability to collect and interpret soft data helps them know just when and how to act.

They manage employees with something we call tough empathy. Inspirational leaders empathize passionately--and realistically--with people, and they care intensely about the work employees do.

They reveal their differences. They capitalize on what's unique about themselves.

You may find yourself in a top position without these qualities, but few people will want to be led by you.

All of these ideas have found expression in my own work with clients and students. I'm a committed believer in the importance of vulnerability as a leadership tool--and I firmly agree with Brené Brown that "vulnerability" isn't "letting it all hang out," oversharing, or indiscriminate disclosure.

My definition of "tough empathy" is the ability to balance support and challenge, and while I believe that effective leaders foster a sense of safety, trust and intimacy that allows people to take risks and grow, I also believe that they hold people accountable in a culture of responsibility.

And I think the ability to understand and celebrate the differences that make them unique--the courage to let their freak flags fly--is a sign of personal strength that distinguishes great leaders from the merely good.

Nov 18, 2016

At a moment when many of us are dismayed by the U.S. election results, enraged by the recent surge in hate crimes, and concerned about the overall direction of the country, it's fitting that this week's topic in The Art of Self-Coaching, the class I teach at Stanford, was Unhappiness. Most of the texts I've selected in the course draw upon research from neuroscience and positive psychology, but this week we looked further afield to Stoic philosophy, a form of psychoanalysis known as logotherapy, and the Buddhist tradition.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. [p 8]

I began my career as a journalist, and I wrote frequently about homelessness, which has been a problem here in the Bay Area for decades. Eventually I decided that I wanted be on the front lines, working to address the issue directly rather than writing about it, and I then spent seven years working with and helping to lead organizations that provided support to homeless and low-income families in San Francisco. I learned many things during those years, and one of the most important lessons was a recognition that solutions are incomplete and transitory, and problems are much bigger and more complex than we realize. We can make progress and we can offer help in an individual life and in a larger social system, but we rarely--if ever--solve problems in permanent, fundamental ways.

Recognizing this must not result in complacency or resignation--to do that would be to turn away from suffering and ignore our moral obligation to ease it--but a failure to recognize the cyclical and impermanent nature of life dooms us to frustration and failure. Things come together, and then they fall apart. The challenge is to find ways to work toward solutions, to strive to come together again and again and again, while knowing that achieving a solution "once and for all" is an impossibility and that falling apart is inevitable.

What we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. If we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves. [p 66]

I don't yet know what there is for me to learn from the present situation in the U.S., but I do know that it's there, and it's important, and it's not going away. Although I stepped forward to do the difficult work described above, I've also made many retreats over the years. I moved to San Francisco a quarter-century ago--I literally ran to the other end of the continent--in part because it felt like a refuge. After seven years in social services, I left the field to go to business school. After a lifetime of political engagement, I began directing more of my attention elsewhere about a decade ago. I don't regret these retreats--they each served a purpose at the time--but they deferred what now feels like a necessary reckoning with the world I find myself in today.

There are many different ways to turn toward experience, of course, but one that seems particularly important at the moment is the initiation of difficult conversations about difference. While I've been less connected with the political process in recent years, I have worked hard to better understand social identity and the ways that gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, income, education, class, and other differences affect our lived experience. It's not lost on me that my ability to pull back from politics to focus on my personal work has derived in part from privileges I enjoy as a result of my own social identity--that of a straight, white American man with an elite education. Thus the fact that I can write above about "dismay" and "concern," when I know many others feel terror and grief (and still others feel hope and enthusiasm).

There are so many connections between social identity and this political moment--the persistence of sexism and racism, the rise of nativist xenophobia, the resentment of the working class and poor toward economic and cultural elites. And I suspect that whatever we are to learn from this moment, as individuals and as societies, we will be obligated to step into more conversations about these topics, and to do so in a way that results in mutual understanding rather than defensiveness and antagonism. I'm under no illusions about the potential for permanent solutions--see above--nor do I think that dialogue alone is sufficient to insure progress. But we won't learn anything without it.

What began as an enormous open space becomes a forest fire, a world war, a volcano erupting, a tidal wave. We use our emotions. We use them. In their essence, they are simply part of the goodness of being alive, but instead of letting them be, we take them and use them to regain our ground. We use them to try to deny that in fact no one has ever known or will ever know what's happening. We use them to try to make everything secure and predictable and real again, to fool ourselves about what's really true. We could just sit with the emotional energy and let it pass. There's no particular need to spread blame and justification. Instead, we throw kerosene on the emotion so it will feel more real. [p 70]

Much of my work as a coach and teacher involves what I call emotion management, which doesn't mean seeking to suppress or control our emotions, but, rather, to enhance our ability to understand and make use of our them as we navigate the world. This often involves a greater openness to our emotional experience and a greater willingness to truly feel our feelings, but that's not to say that we should simply give way before our emotions and allow them to determine our actions. As Chödrön notes, in the midst of difficulties we may exploit our feelings to justify our positions and beliefs, to create a false sense of security and predictability when the world around us is anything but secure or predictable. While our emotions have a useful role to play in helping us cope with and respond to the difficulties ahead, the task is to remain in touch with our feelings while not allowing them to exhaust us or dictate our perspective.

Some of the most challenging emotions in this context are those that tend to evoke defensiveness--embarrassment, guilt, shame. We often react violently to these emotional states because we find them so intolerable and difficult to bear. We deny that we're experiencing them (despite ample evidence to the contrary). We distance ourselves forcefully from the people and situations that we associate with these emotions. We hide our vulnerability under fits of self-righteous anger. And we look for others to blame--we need them to take responsibility for our discomfort.

These dynamics are problematic enough in day-to-day life under ordinary circumstances, and they're even more difficult to deal with now because so many of the larger issues at play inevitably trigger defensiveness. In my experience it's simply not possible to have the kinds of conversations about social identity that I mention above without feeling some embarrassment, guilt, or shame, and without that resulting in defensiveness. And all too often this ends in shouting matches or slamming doors. The key is to follow Chödrön's guidance--to just sit with these emotions, as uncomfortable as they are, and to avoid turning them into self-righteous anger, as good as that feels. The solution is to lower the shield of our defensiveness that we automatically raise when we believe we're under attack. And to do this we must make peace with our vulnerability. We must become comfortable with our discomfort.

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who's awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we're going to have an experience that we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head...

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. [p 70]

A theme in Chödrön's work and many of the other texts I ask my students to read for The Art of Self-Coaching is recognizing where we have agency and control, as well as the limits on our agency and control. One of the most important findings from positive psychology is our ability to influence our sense of happiness and fulfillment in life through consistent daily practices, such as meditation, and through the adoption of certain mental models, such as a growth mindset. But a potential downside of this perspective is that it can leave us ill-equipped to handle the inevitable challenges that are beyond our influence. This is true at the personal level, where any number of tragedies will befall us no matter how often we meditate, how far we jog, or what we eat every day, and that truth is compounded at the societal level, where no amount of political activism or organizing will guarantee a desired outcome. And yet again, the task is to not allow awareness of the limits on our agency result in resignation or complacency. We have to do what we can, while recognizing that it may not be enough. We have to build our nest and find comfort in it, while preparing to be thrown out of it over and over again.

We often find ourselves in the middle of a dilemma--what should I do about the fact that somebody is angry at me? What should I do about the fact that I'm angry with somebody? Basically, the instruction is not to try to solve the problem but instead to use it as a question about how to let this very situation wake us up further rather than lull us into ignorance. We can use a difficult situation to encourage ourselves to take a leap, to step out of that ambiguity.

This teaching applies to even the most horrendous situations life can dish out. Jean-Paul Sartre said that there are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free or not free. This is our choice in every moment. Do we relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness?

That is why it can be said that whatever occurs can be regarded as the path and that all things, not just some things, are workable. This teaching is a fearless proclamation of what's possible for ordinary people like you and me. [pp 145-6]

By citing this passage, with its reference to the gas chambers, I'm not making an analogy between the U.S. in 2016 and Nazi Germany, although I know people who fear that we're taking steps in that direction. But I value Chödrön's reminder that even in the worst possible circumstances, we always have a choice as to how we face them. This point is also made by Viktor Frankl, another author assigned to my students this week. Frankl was a psychiatrist who spent four years in concentration camps, including Auschwitz. By the end of the war his pregnant wife, his parents and his brother had been murdered; among his immediate family, only he and his sister survived. It was after these experiences that he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, which includes this moving passage:

We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation--just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer--we are challenged to change ourselves...

But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering--provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political... [pp 112-13]

This election cycle has served to remind me vividly just how much suffering there is in so many different places right now. And I'm particularly aware of the suffering that has increased over the past week as hateful bigots now seem to feel even greater license to harass, intimidate, and terrorize women, people of color, gays and lesbians, Jews and Muslims, among others. Those of us who oppose this bigotry do not face a hopeless situation, by any means, and yet it now seems likely that there will be more tragedies and more suffering to come. But this is the path, and it's our task to face it with openness, whatever that means for each of us.

Aug 22, 2016

Sheldon Kopp was a therapist and author based in Washington DC whose work was widely read in the 1970s but who is largely forgotten today. When Kopp died in 1999 at age 70 he merited a New York Times obituary, although it does him a disservice by calling him "an author of books designed to bolster the reader's self-esteem." Kopp was in tune with the zeitgeist in a way that contributed to his popularity but which also makes it easy to oversimplify or misinterpret his writing in hindsight, and it's laughable to think that he would have described his goal as "bolstering self-esteem." That said, Kopp also reflects his era's prejudices, particularly those of straight, white, educated men, and when I read him today I regularly come across passages that make me cringe.

But I find enough of value in Kopp's perspective that I'm determined to remain open to his wisdom while acknowledging his biases. One of Kopp's best books is 1979's What Took You So Long?, a collaboration with photographer Claire Flanders. I encountered it at a particularly difficult time in my own life, and it was both a bracing wake-up call and a source of comfort and inspiration. The book is a slender volume of epigrams, typically just one sentence, each accompanied by one of Flanders' photographs, which are themselves rich with meaning. It's out-of-print but readily available, and if you find the excerpts below thought-provoking I hope you'll pick up a copy, both because Kopp's brief Introduction is well worth a read and because it's so much more powerful as a printed, visual work.

From What Took You So Long? by Sheldon Kopp

Often things are as bad as they seem.

Even so, some of the time it's possible to enjoy life as it is.

But the better anything gets, the more you'll miss it when it's gone.

Why grieve when nothing helps? We cry because nothing helps.

If you stubbornly refuse to mourn your losses, you get depressed.

What's a person to do about feeling helpless? For a while there's just no way to see what's funny about being stuck.

At last you cry out in anguish: "Why me?" God answers: "Why not?"

You can so stand it.

After all, it's only pain.

What makes it seem unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.

I have never begun any important venture for which I felt adequately prepared.

Without knowing for sure what's right or wrong, take your best shot.

There's just no way to get it all straight. Mistakes are inevitable.

Control is an illusion.

You wait for everything to be all right, knowing all the while that the next problem is already in the mail.

Complaining can become a way of boasting about how much suffering you can endure.

If we allow pain more of our attention than it requires, we miss some opportunities for joy.

Escape is not a dirty word. None of us can face what's happening head-on all of the time.

It's all right to pretend sometimes. The only danger lies in pretending that you are not pretending.

We don't have to pass the time. The time will pass in any case.

Remember, we are all in this alone.

It helps to know that everyone is in the same situation. It helps, but not a whole lot.

Unable to get our own way, often we settle for trying to prevent other people from getting their way.

We insist that our situation is special. It's so hard to accept how ordinary we all are.

We must learn to love in the absence of illusions.

We must try to live a just life in an unjust world.

We must be willing to go on caring even when we are helpless to change things.

Our best may not turn out to be good enough. Still it will have to do.

I'm clearly not the most objective reviewer, but I think it's a great resource with some very practical advice that draws upon both research and practice. Many thanks to my colleagues at HBR who've done a really nice job at compiling another useful Guide.

Apr 26, 2016

I was recently asked to recommend readings on humility for someone who aspires to be a better leader. I found that an interesting request, because I'm not a particularly humble person. I've taken the VIA Survey on Character Strengths three times over the last ten years, and every time humility has been the very last item in my results--so I'm clearly not the best resource on the topic. That said, I certainly find myself humbled on a regular basis by 1) thoughts of mortality and 2) a keen awareness of my limitations.

And while recognizing the value of humility, I also believe we need to ask whether its absence is truly preventing effective leadership. Sometimes it does--see Bob Sutton's The No Asshole Rule--and sometimes what's characterized as a lack of humility is an essential element in the process of obtaining and wielding power effectively. Here work by David McClelland and Jeff Pfeffer (among others) is essential reading.

Jan 03, 2016

I was a voracious reader as a kid. I knew how to read before I ever went to school, thanks to my parents and the first few seasons of Sesame Street, and the habit stuck with me for decades. And then...I stopped. More accurately, I didn't stop reading--I read as much as I ever did--but I stopped reading fiction. I read the odd novel once in a while, or a story in The New Yorker, but most of my reading was "professional" in nature, focused on topics intended to help me be a better coach, a better teacher.

And while I certainly grew in some ways as a result, I stopped growing in other, equally important ways. The relationships I developed with fictional characters (and their authors) as a reader were more meaningful to me than I'd realized, and I came to feel their absence more acutely.

So last year as I prepared to take a leave from my work at Stanford over the summer, I asked my wife if she would provide me with a reading list. If you know Amy, you understand this request--she's the voracious kid reader who never quit. She reads 150 novels a year, every year. Hell, she read dozens of novels a year when she was 5th in her class in law school. So she was pretty excited--and here's what I read in 2015, thanks to her:

A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O'Brien

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton

The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

Troubles, J.G. Farrell

The Singapore Grip, J.G. Farrell

Augustus, John Williams

Stoner, John Williams

The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley

The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning

The Levant Trilogy, Olivia Manning

I, Claudius, Robert Graves

Claudius the God, Robert Graves

A Good Man in Africa, William Boyd

Any Human Heart, William Boyd

An Ice Cream War, William Boyd

So having spent half a year re-immersed in fiction, here are three things I've learned:

Fiction Teaches Empathy

Recentresearch suggests that empathy can be taught--and this was readily apparent to me after my return to fiction-reading. Perhaps more than any other representation of human experience, fiction puts the reader inside another person's psyche, with uniquely privileged access to their inner thoughts, feelings and perceptions. John Williams allowed me to be Caesar Augustus, looking back with equanimity on a life of triumph and failure. Olivia Manning allowed me to be a wartime English bride trapped in Eastern Europe and a failed marriage as the Nazis advance. J.G. Farrell allowed me to be a man in hand-to-hand combat who survives by the slimmest margin of dumb luck. The act of reading fiction--good fiction, at least--is the definition of empathy: understanding and sharing another person's experience.

Fiction Prompts Reflection

The importance of reflection in the learning process isn't news to me--hey, I teach this stuff. (Stephen Colbert puts it more eloquently than I could at 5:13.) But over this past year I was struck by fiction's power to bring me up short and stop my usual headlong progress toward the next thing. I was reminded that while good books are page-turners, the very best books compel us to put them down every few pages--sometimes to fully digest what we're taking in, at other times because the words on the page take us elsewhere, and we have to follow our own thoughts before we can return to those of the character. But in either case fiction isn't a distraction from deeper thought, but a gateway into it.

Fiction Rewards Persistent Effort

Reading fiction takes work--sometimes a lot of work over many days in a row. Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy was the second book Amy gave me last summer, and when she plopped the 944-page volume in front of me I'm pretty sure I said, "You have got to be kidding me." And the first few days were a bit of a slog, but I trusted Amy's judgment enough to persist, and soon enough I was hooked. Toughing it out through difficult passages in order to enjoy the rewarding experience that can come only after some hardship was a hallmark of the best fiction I read last year. The books that were a breeze to read from start to finish certainly lightened my mood, but they rarely transported me to great heights, and I came to appreciate the payoff that usually followed persistent efforts.

And?

The punchline, of course, is that all of these tasks--cultivating my capacity for empathy, engaging in reflective thought, repeated efforts at focusing my attention--are precisely the practices that allow me to continue to grow and develop as a coach and teacher. I can't say that I'm more effective than I was a year ago--that's for my clients and students to decide. But I feel more effective, more capable, better equipped. And I'm certainly a richer person.

So I'm keeping at it, and I've asked Amy to continue the recommendations into 2016. Currently I'm reading Rose Tremain's Restoration. Next up, Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate--all 896 pages of it.

Jul 21, 2015

John Williams' historical novel Augustus tells the life story of the founder of the Roman Empire through a series of invented documents--letters, journal entries, official records--most of which are written about or to the man himself. The book concludes by finally revealing Augustus's own voice in a letter to a trusted confidant, written shortly before his death at age 75. It's a magnificent conclusion to a brilliant book, and I find this passage particularly striking:

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them... [p 274-5]

I certainly see my own illusions reflected here, and although I don't feel quite ready to call myself a "man of age," these days I am less distressed by my failures and less excited by my triumphs. It's not that I don't have these feelings, but it's easier to step out from inside them, observe them, and let them go. Extremes of shame and pride alike seem a bit absurd.

This emotional evolution is a counterpart to Simon Wardley's Three Stages of Expertise, in which we start out as Beginners who know nothing, we then become Hazards because we think we know so much more than we actually do, and we're finally Experts when we realize how little we truly know relative to all there is to be known. We find wisdom when we grasp our ignorance.

Meyer, an American who teaches at INSEAD, draws on the work of previous researchers in the field, most notably Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars and she shares credit generously, but her own significant contribution is the Culture Map itself, a framework that looks at communication on multiple dimensions and locates various national cultures on each one.

I've distilled her findings for the seven largest economies in the world at the moment--the United States, China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Brazil--and mapped them on each spectrum. The indented passages below are excerpted from The Culture Map and correspond to the slides above, interspersed with my comments on the implications of this data for working in the US.

1. Communication Style

Low-Context: Good communication is precise, simple, and clear. Messages are expressed and understood at face value. Repetition is appreciated if it helps clarify the communication.

High-Context: Good communication is sophisticated, nuanced, and layered. Messages are both spoken and read between the lines. Messages are often implied but not plainly expressed. (page 39)

It's noteworthy to me--albeit unsurprising--that the US is the most extreme low-context culture in Meyer's study, and I find this one of the most striking data points from her findings. It seems to explain much of the communication difficulties I've seen and experienced across cultural boundaries.

2. Evaluation Style (Negative Feedback)

Direct: Negative feedback is provided frankly, bluntly, honestly. Negative messages stand alone, not softened by positive ones. Absolute descriptors are often used ("totally inappropriate," "completely unprofessional") when criticizing. Criticism may be given to an individual in front of a group.

Indirect: Negative feedback to a colleague is provided softly, subtly, diplomatically. Positive messages are used to wrap negative ones. Qualifying descriptors are often used ("sort of inappropriate," "slightly unprofessional") when criticizing. Criticism is only given in private. (page 69)

My own experience in the US corresponds with our position in the middle of the spectrum, and I've found that a soft start helps a great deal when providing negative feedback in this culture.

3. Disagreement Style

Confrontational: Disagreement and debate are positive for the team or organization. Open confrontation is appropriate and will not negatively impact the relationship.

Conflict-Averse: Disagreement and debate are negative for the team or organization. Open confrontation is inappropriate and will break group harmony or negatively impact the relationship. (page 201)

I suspect that the US position in the middle of this spectrum reflects a national tendency to seek a balance between confrontation and harmony, and at the same time my experience as a professional and a coach makes clear that this varies widely across organizations and industries. I'm aware of professional settings in the US that are extremely confrontational and others that are just as conflict-averse.

4. Persuasive Style

Practical Applications: Individuals are trained to begin with a fact, statement, or opinion and later add concepts to back up or explain the conclusion as necessary. The preference is to begin a message or report with an executive summary or bullet points. Discussions are approached in a practical concrete manner. Theoretical or philosophical discussions are avoided in a business environment.

Conceptual Principles: Individuals have been trained to first develop the theory or complex concept before presenting a fact, statement, or opinion. The preference is to begin a message or report by building up a theoretical argument before moving on to a conclusion. The conceptual principles underlying each situation are valued. (page 96)

The emphasis on practical applications is consistent throughout much of US business culture, although in certain settings you can strengthen your point by noting the conceptual basis later (but rarely--if ever--up front.)

5. Source of Trust

Task-Accomplishment: Trust is based through business-related activities. Work relationships are built and dropped easily, based on the practicality of the situation. You do good work consistently, you are reliable, I enjoy working with you: I trust you.

Personal Relationships: Trust is built through sharing meals, evening drinks, and visits at the coffee machine. Work relationships build up slowly over the long term. I've seen who you are at a deep level, I've shared personal time with you, I know others well who trust you: I trust you. (page 171)

This finding of Meyer's was one of the most enlightening for me, perhaps because it used plain language to explain subtle social dynamics I've sensed but haven't fully understood. It was no surprise to learn that the US is the culture most focused on task accomplishment as a source of trust, and I see this as an all-too-common source of cross-cultural misunderstandings.

Many thanks to Erin Meyer for developing a tremendously useful resource for anyone working across cultural boundaries. I look forward to putting these principles to into practice immediately in my work at Stanford and my coaching practice.

Notes:

In this post I've re-ordered the sequence of the concepts from Meyer's book, changed some of the headings, and flipped a few of the endpoints to make a more consistent slide deck. The page numbers are from Public Affairs' 2014 hardback edition.

I've cut out two concepts Meyer discusses, power distance and decision-making, because they were less relevant to my topic here, but I wrote about Hofstede's research on the former in 2008.

Mar 23, 2015

Ironies abound as I turn to this review of Scott Eblin's Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. I've been meaning to write about it for months, but have continually delayed, feeling too busy with students, clients, my own writing and life in general. It would be inaccurate to say that I'm "overworked," but my plate's been pretty full for a while. (Irony #1.)

I finally made time for it when a recent cold left me feeling capable of reading and writing, but not well enough to hold any coaching sessions, so I had an unexpectedly empty calendar for a few days. I know myself well enough to be confident that I got sick because my self-care practices have fallen apart the last few weeks. To take the most relevant example, after meditating roughly every other day from August 2014 through mid-February, I've meditated just 3 times in the last 5 weeks. (Irony #2.)

And all this has happened as I prepare to teach The Art of Self-Coaching, a new course at Stanford aimed at helping MBAs manage themselves more effectively through periods of difficulty and transition. (Irony #3. Coach, coach thyself.)

Some disclosures: I've met Scott and consider him a friend, and we've occasionally referred potential clients to each other, although we don't have a business relationship. But even if I didn't know Scott at all I'd be a fan of this book because I believe in its message--as he writes in the Introduction,

[M]indfulness is the intersection of two qualities: awareness and intention. By awareness, I mean awareness of what's going on both around you and inside of you in any given moment. Being aware enables you to act in the moment with the intention of creating a particular outcome or result.

The purpose of Overworked and Overwhelmed is to make the practice of mindfulness easy, accessible, and relevant for people who feel like they're trapped on the gerbil wheel. The goal is not to turn you into a Buddhist monk or nun but to offer the knowledge that, along with simple, practical, and applicable routines, will help you align your work and the rest of your life with the results that matter most. The emphasis here is on small steps that, when taken consistently over time, lead to big results."

This is exactly how I talk about mindfulness with my clients and students. A tremendous amount of research has emerged in the last few decades, which Scott cites in the book, that suggests the power of mindfulness practices to improve our ability to cope with stress, manage our emotions, focus our attention, and perform effectively under difficult circumstances. To reap these benefits we need not embrace any spiritual principles that have historically been associated with mindfulness or meditation, nor do we need to make major changes in our daily lives. As Scott notes, all that's required is a consistent commitment to some simple, regular routines.

The centerpiece of this process is meditation, but Scott discusses a wide range of other activities that contribute to a heightened state of internal and external awareness, from regular physical activity and better sleep habits to breathing exercises and listening skills. And one of the book's great strengths is its open-ended, non-prescriptive approach to these practices. I talk about mindfulness, exercise, sleep, and stress reduction with almost all of my coaching clients, but I don't prescribe any particular set of practices for a given individual. We're much too complex for any single formula to apply to everyone, and Overworked and Overwhelmed respects this complexity, providing readers with a thoughtful set of possibilities and yet also recognizing that each reader must decide what will work best for themselves.

Another strength of the book is Scott's voice as an author, which shows up not only in his informal, conversational style, but also in his level of personal disclosure. He reveals that in 2009 he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and that his commitment to meditation, yoga, and an improved diet in recent years "literally saved my life." And he's not merely surviving; he writes that today, "I'm stronger than I've ever been before and savoring each moment of life in a way that I never have before."

If you're already a committed meditator or actively engaged in other mindfulness practices, I suspect you'll still find something of value in Overworked and Overwhelmed, particularly in Scott's discussion of how these practices can contribute to a greater sense of meaning and purpose. And if you've been curious about (or skeptical of) the value of mindfulness as a personal management tool, I recommend Scott's book as an engaging introduction to the topic.